Winter 2019 Courses

January 7 – January 25, 2018

Cinema and Urbanism /SCA-UA 624.001

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

Prof. Sukhdev Sandhu

This class explores critical issues in contemporary urbanism through the prism of a diverse and international body of cutting-edge documentary and feature films. Drawing on an equally broad range of theoretical and historical texts, we will investigate topics such as psychogeography, catacombism, landscape hacking, surveillance, slum urbanism and many more. We will also look at the specific role of cinema in generating, framing and circulating emergent notions about the modern city. Films to be studied may include: ‘The Gleaners and I’, ‘Children of Men’, ‘Manufactured Landscapes’, ‘Helvetica’, ‘War In Mostar’. (Counts as SCA faculty elective for these SCA majors/minors: AMST, APA, MET, SCA.)

How does what you listen to shape your sense of self? How do we relate to each other through music? And how does music cross linguistic, political, social, and ethnic boundaries? This course will take up some of these questions as it explores a few historical instances in which music has traveled extensively, finding listeners in a wide array of places. We will revisit the reception and performance of different music in the Americas and beyond to consider how rhythms and compositions were resituated in different contexts, with particular concern for their roles in bridging between members of the African diaspora. Throughout the course, we’ll listen to musical examples from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, New Orleans, New York, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, while reading interventions by critics and musicians regarding these music, their contexts, and their theoretical implications.

The course is taught in English and carries no prerequisites. The course will count toward the major and minor in Spanish if students complete writing and key readings in Spanish. (Counts as cross listed elective for these major/minors: AFRI, LAST, and only for AMST and SCA majors.)